mostly david ephgrave

It's a week today since I caught the train to Edinburgh to bring my show 'Good Grief' to the Fringe, and it's also the first chance I've had to take stock and write something to post here. The short answer to the question, "So, how's it going so far, David?" is, "It's going well, David; thanks for asking", though, as it's the Fringe, that comes with many caveats. Or am I just being pessimistic? The fact is Edinburgh's one hell of an endurance exercise, however you look at it, with a definite sense of one step forward, two steps back.  (And that's just navigating Cowgate.) The biggest challenge is doing it alone. Firstly, there's the logistical impact. Some people who bring shows to Edinburgh have producers and directors assisting them. Not old muggins Ephgrave. The only person I have working for me is my PR, who's brilliant and lovely, but I pay for that (well, not the lovely bit, which comes naturally) as I know with...

After five and a half years, Glyn and I have moved to a bigger office on the same premises, which now puts us at the advantage of having room to swing a Bengal tiger. When we took on the first space, we worried if we could justify it, but despite being the size of a modest broom-cupboard (with just enough room to keep a dustpan & brush), we put it to good use; all my solo shows were written and rehearsed there, and the majority of our radio shows were recorded there too, which was a bit of a squeeze for the three of us involved.  It was also a storeroom for our Mostly Comedy gear in-between shows, which pretty much rendered it impossible to run our material there without kissing. (Like that's an excuse.) While it's sad to see it go (admittedly only across the corridor) the move is a positive step that reeks of potential. The new office is actually two rooms - one the size of our original office and another approximately six times bigger - which enables us to ke...

The other day, I watched a rough cut of the performance of my show we filmed at The Market Theatre in Hitchin last month and Glyn has done a splendid job with it; I look set to be in the uncharted territory of being both almost happy with a representation of me doing stand-up and looking forward to sharing it. I’m not saying it’s perfect - it wanders off a bit towards the end, but it did as a piece anyway - but the vast majority is a good quality reading of what I was trying to do that the audience were really on board for; I hope that by having a solid copy of my stuff to give to industry people, I may be able to end the stand-off between trying to book dates for them to come to and them being available to see it. In a way, the video is like having evidence: proof of the fact I’m not as bad a comic as my inner monologue tells me or like a handful of misunderstanding reviewers might say. I was actually quite proud of what I wound up with this year,...

It’s very seldom something like filming a show goes well without question, so I was extremely fortunate and grateful for how last night’s recording of my solo show at The Market Theatre went. For starters, I was amazed we sold out, as that only tends to happen when we host an act at Mostly Comedy that’s a big pull. I’ve cancelled countless performances through the years (admittedly primarily in London) due to poor - or no - turnout, so I’ve grown to expect people won't come; each time this happens chips away at your self confidence despite the many perfectly justifiable reasons for it, so I was genuinely surprised and delighted when ticket sales suddenly picked up last week. Admittedly the venue has a small capacity, but last night’s crowd were responsive enough to be an audience three times its size. I was pleased with how easy our get-in was too. Glyn, Paul and I began at around 2pm (though to be fair Glyn had been there earlier to prep the s...

Today was spent getting ‘My Part in His Downfall’ back into some sort of vague shape to be filmed at the Hitchin’s Market Theatre on Thursday. It’s strange running it on my own again after a month of doing it in front of an audience; when you write a stand-up show you spend a lot of time talking to yourself, but it doesn’t truly come alive until you have a room of people to tell it to; it’s then that it starts to make sense. I felt that with this show particularly as it’s ostensibly quite different to my other ones, though this might not be obvious at first glance. While the format’s the same, the subject matter is a lot more personal and my approach to the material is lighter than my first three shows, which were more aimed at the outside world than at me and had more attack. I wasn’t even aware of this myself really until I started doing it with an audience with the songs added to the mix. My only concern about Thursday is that I’ll end u...

It’s almost worth doing the Fringe for the feeling you get as you travel away from it: ideally at speed. At time of writing I’m on the train to Peterborough, where I’ll meet my connection to Hitchin and not a moment too soon (unless I'm early). That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the last month - although I’m not entirely sure ‘enjoy’ is the right word for it - but nevertheless, it will be a relief to be home; taking a show to Edinburgh’s always a grueling experience, so it’s best to give yourself a little distance from it (both literally and metaphorically) before you reflect over how it went for you, for good or for bad. One thing’s for certain: I don’t ever want to do a show at midday again. My two previous solo Fringes were at the same time too, but this year, the downturn in numbers was painfully evident, which was such a shame when I think the show was my best, in the sense that it had a lot more depth. On the plus side, I felt the p...

Today’s show had just to two real people in, plus my new flyerer (who’s a real person too) who unfortunately had to leave before the end; something I was sure to mention at the beginning, so the two genuine punters didn’t think she was walking out. It was once again a lovely show and the pair in were very receptive, but of course it’s frustrating to do a good one and have so few people see it. Basically, I’m falling victim to a terrible start-time, as when I arrive there’s essentially no-one about, but when I leave the venue at 13:20pm, The Caves is bustling with people going to watch the mixed bill show Afternoon Delights or some such. I sincerely hope this picks up, as I don’t want a show I’m proud of that’s starting to settle despite a difficult genesis (like Phil Collins' stroppy band) to be seen by next-to-nobody and to just get a single and largely inaccurate write-up, like the one from The List that popped up yesterday, which bizarrely s...

At time of writing, I’m on the train to Edinburgh for my third consecutive solo show there (and fourth in a row in total) and sixth or seventh EdFringe run, depending on how you count it. What’s weird is my first trip to this ultimate spawning ground for a performer's nervous breakdown was ten years ago this week; this time in 2008, Glyn and I climbed into a hire van with only Haribo for sustenance and drove to Scotland with a fictional flat-packed hot-air balloon basket stowed in the back, for our first Edinburgh Fringe show The Balloon Debate. Now here I am, travelling to Auld Reekie for my third Fringe alone. If you’d asked me a decade ago if I’d ever consider bringing a solo show to Edinburgh I’d shake my head, start crying and run out of the room, particularly if you'd raised the question in September. Yet here I am, facing solo Edinburgh Number Three. It’s hard to compute how I feel about this. At the moment, I’m in a bubble of self-medicated calm, thanks to the com...

With a busy week of Mostly Comedy dates at our first five-day Festival to contend with, it's no wonder I'm behind on my blog. On top of this, I've been doing promotional interviews to sell my forthcoming Edinburgh show 'David Ephgrave: My Part in His Downfall.  In my last post, I shared one such interview with the theatre blogger West End Wilma. Today, I'd like you to cast your eye over another Q&A I did with the alternative Festival magazine, Fringepig; you can read the original article here : ·       Tell me about your Edinburgh show. It’s essentially a one-man self-character assassination with jokes; like performing an autopsy on myself using a mic instead of a scalpel. In the show, I try to work out why a performer who’s achieved more than he perhaps gives himself credit - and who apparently refers to himself in third-person - can only ever remember the bad bits to discard the good. I also consider other culprits who’ve...

Today, I finally got around to a job I've been meaning to do for weeks and pulled together a few paragraphs about this year's Edinburgh show to form the basis of a press release for it. I haven't let the title slip here yet as far as I'm aware, so now's as good a time as any: my fourth solo show (and third solo EdFringe affair) is called 'David Ephgrave: My Part in His Downfall' . I toyed with a few other possibilities - and very nearly went with 'David Ephgrave's Chortle Enemy' - but am ultimately happy with my final choice, which offers a fair amount of scope. It's a concept that makes me laugh, which is half the battle won really - and while it obviously has a slight Spike Milligan aftertaste the joke's a little different, and I like how it suggests I'm only prepared to take partial credit for my misdemeanours. The copy so far is an early draft that doesn't include any of my credits and hasn't been worked over by my PR,...

I’ve only got two more performances of last year’s show to go - tonight in London and next month in Leicester - and while I’m still proud of it, I realised yesterday why it’s so hard to keep hold of that. When I first performed a skeleton version of it at Bath Comedy Festival last April, I was already happy with the reaction it got; for me, it was nice to be doing something fresh, plus I was fortunate enough that the audience enjoyed it at this early stage. The following month I took a slightly more polished version to the Brighton Fringe which also went down well, and this continued to build across the various previews in June and July and into the (allegedly) finished version to Edinburgh. The problem psychologically is the negative by-product you pick up along the way. In most cases, every show is the first time that audience has seen it, yet inevitably I’ve been to every one (it would be weird it I wasn’t); and while there’s nothing wrong with having to approach it afr...

I got back to my digs feeling a little despondent today, to find a lovely message sent to me via the blog, which was perfectly timed, coming at the end of a long day. It was really nice of them to take the trouble to seek out a way to contact me to tell me they enjoyed it. One of the hardest parts of doing the Fringe alone is remaining positive and energised in the face of such a relentless workload, when the only encouragement you get is from those closest to you (who ironically are geographically far away for the month) and from the audience in the room during the gig itself - and if the houses are occasionally on the small side, those audiences can often be intimidated into silence. Today’s show was a case in point in that there weren’t many in, but I could at least tell they were enjoying it; two women in particular in fact, who were giggling all the way through, albeit quietly, due to the size of the audience. While I was pleased it went w...

I did quite bit of work on my show today, both in terms of running the material and orchestrating the admin that goes with it, but I'm finding it hard to make improvements - or to even know that's what they are - without a director to steer me through it. Sadly, it all goes down to personal judgement at the moment, as it’s next-to-impossible to get someone to commit to helping me out and - even if they were to - they’d have to be just the right person for the job. What I could really do with someone to tell me what’s already right as I’m naturally hypercritical, and I don’t want to replace stuff that works with stuff that doesn’t, if things evolve that way without the benefit of an outside eye to put a lid on it. I was surprised to find a fair amount already worked when I did my work-in-progress dates in Bath in April and Brighton in May; I don’t want to lose the essence of what I did there through over-thinking and over-editing it, but at the same time, I still w...